Marc Couroux

My work as a whole is concerned with exploring the potential of art as a motor for social investigation, in which the properties of the work itself, employing the perceptual and cultural prejudices of the viewer as prime material, enables the creation of a productive, creative zone of inquiry. My work is designed to empower
the viewer to think critically about what he is witnessing, leading him to make imaginative and metaphorical linkages between art and social issues. Indeed, the artwork should function as a generator of ideas, a mirror of the viewer's own relationship to the world around him, a stimulus for further inquiry. As such, both the media employed is achieving this goal, as well as the stylistic approaches adopted will vary radically, according to the needs of the work.

The critical investigation of the binding ties between performer and
viewer, the focus of my work for many years, was first explored in the context of the standard concert ritual. My early works constituted an X-ray of the proscenium-audience dialectic the basic social format of the concert by subverting the basic power-structure enacted between the onstage hero (the performer) bearing the ultimate truth and the captive disciple (the listener-viewer).

In challenging the authority of the performer on stage, I intended to
undermine the existing hierarchical and political structures within
which concert music is presented. By providing the listener-viewer with a continuously shifting, ambiguous, conflicting set of relationships between the performer-protagonist and his public, I created a situation which resisted easy absorption into dominant ideologies. By constantly sending out contradictory messages to the viewer, I wanted to gain his active mobilization in the concert ritual. It was my intent to provide the viewer with anti-absorptive strategies, contradictions and confrontations between the various mediums requiring him/her to formulate an active, critical, analytical response, effectively ensuring the artwork remains electrically charged with potential meaning and permeable to
interpretation, yet irreducibly complex and stubbornly resistant to
summarization.

The questioning of traditional communicative paradigms was then applied across various disciplines, in works in which metaphorical analogies to social issues are constructed with the help of the viewer's perceptual abilities. For instance, the concept of electricity deregulation is projected onto the material in such a way that instigates a parallel deregulation of the viewer's ability to absorb and consolidate the experience according to familiar narrative norms: by creating constantly shifting visual densities, some easy to absorb (e.g. multiples of the same image), some not (e.g. three levels of simultaneous activity), the viewer's concentration is continuously manipulated, directly influencing
his/her perception of time passing, rendering time itself a tactile
phenomenon. In other words, (physical) energy deregulation is investigated via a parallel deregulation of psychic energy.

More recent works have specifically addressed the pervasively binding relationship between performer and viewer via frequently malfunctioning technological mediators (both analog and digital), which shatter the protective membrane surrounding the performer, prising open a speculative space between his spun stage image and his true nature. In these works, the viewer is thrust into a uniquely critical position, able to interpret the ongoing proceedings under a more subversive, critical light, while the performer, increasingly paranoid and under scrutiny will seek to control the aspects of his persona he chooses to reveal.

In short, regardless of the media and tools employed, my
interdisciplinary work seeks above all to renew the communicative links between the work of art and the viewer, providing the latter with insight that can lead to adopting a more speculative attitude about the world at large.